“Can art be artificial and intelligent at the same time?”, is a question that unfolds a paradox: the hypothetical (according to some) or potential (according to others) intelligence of the non-living” https://t.co/qHlbGpR1q3

“These moments of intoxication when we defy everything, when, the anchor raised, we go merrily toward the abyss, with no more thought for the inevitable fall than for the limits given in the beginning, are the only ones when we are completely free of the ground (of laws) …”

CCTV footage from a wave of after-hours robberies in Houston has birthed a viral sensation, thanks to the robbers’ tactic of commando-crawling on the floor, which has led to them being dubbed the “inchworm bandits.”

It’s possible they’re doing this to avoid having their heights, gaits, and faces captured by security cameras, but it’s also a fascinating piece of performance art.

TROLLING IS THE NEW CRITICAL THEORY BUT LIKE WE’RE ALREADY AT THE PRECIPICE OF THE EPOCHS COLLAPSE INTO ITSELF RENDERING THE PROJECT AN EMPTY GESTURE SLOWLY LOSING ITS ABILITY TO SIGNIFY SHORT OF EMOTIONAL MANIPULATION LIKE A DAYTIME SOAP …

Reliability engineering is the technical discipline of estimating, controlling and managing theprobability of failure in devices, equipment and systems. Design principles and tools which should be utilized by the designer include

Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) is discussed in detail which includes a step-by-step procedure, demonstration requirements, failure mode distribution, determination ofcriticality, use of computer analysis and its limitations. Note: FMECA is also addressed in Chapter 12.0 of this Primer.

A sneak circuit is defined as an unexpected path or logic flow within a system, which, under certain conditions, can initiate an undesired function or inhibit a desired function. Sneak Circuit Analysis (SCA) is the term applied to analytical techniques used to detect and identify sneak circuits in a system. The point is made that unlike other reliability analyses, SCA concentrates onthe interconnections, interrelationships and interactions of system components rather than the components themselves….

Being with John Mawurndjul’s extraordinary work is less like visiting an exhibition, and more like being transported to another part of the Universe. One where the laws of nature, the very references of reality, are fundamentally different, yet supernaturally familiar. pic.twitter.com/uvhvPgY6Ou

tl;dr [I am happy to share the data on the time, resource and energy it takes one human to grow *one* mushroom, farm 5 locusts and make a portion of mealworm risotto] no magical fix here. pic.twitter.com/XkoYXsGwds

Article about @_foam in @blueprintmag: “Labs can take up that moral position — that desire for personal and social growth, for civic advancement and enlightenment — which many of our institutions seem to have forgotten was once their guiding principle.” https://t.co/GvaqedF3QW

What you call darkness is not what a cat calls darkness, not what an owl calls darkness. Your reality is yours alone and only cousin to the reality of other creatures. Think of all the self-contained worlds and alien landscapes that prowl and glide just beyond your dark windows.

Idea for adversarial press briefings: reporters type in questions that go on a leaderboard, and vote on what they want answered. Top question goes first. Questions stay on top till majority marks them ‘answered’. Nice and decorous.

Now you may ask: where have all those convolutional artifacts and supersaturated images gone that pioneered this space? Well, I tell you: they became victims of gantrification and were driven far out into the zones where the gradients only descent once a week. pic.twitter.com/yXgAyEz6rX

A large crater lies underneath Greenland’s Hiawatha Glacier—a well-known, but little-studied part of the planet. Now scientists hope to determine if it could be linked to a controversial extinction theory.https://t.co/sjp6uSq9Au

And so it goes. Goodnight #StanLee. I’ll just say again: May we all be so fortunate as to live so long and see as much of our work and the work of the people we love have as wide an impact on the world as Stanley Lieber did. Poor Jewish kid from NYC made it about as big as it get

post-shanzhai arises at the intersection of big tech marketing and bad urban design, becoming the perfect carrier for state surveillance: if you add enough screens and traditional culture, face recognition cameras become an acceptable externality https://t.co/DLxLmVryQV

wondering if it makes sense of identifying a “post-shanzhai” trend emerging in Chinese tech, as copycatting and cloning low/mid-tier consumer electronics give way to shitty and uncanny tech demos https://t.co/P5zWzc5WpI

“A house must be like a small city if it’s to be a real house; a city like a large house if it’s to be a real city? In fact, what is large without being small has no more real size than what is small without being large. If there is no real size, there will be no human size.”

Re-reading #AaronSwartz’s Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, on what would have been his 32nd birthday, and in the middle of the final #AccessLab sessions for 2018. As relevant now as it was ten years ago - keep fighting, in any way you can. https://t.co/r583ZtxGLq

US researchers have successfully tested the rather whacky idea of producing electricity from a mushroom covered in bacteria. The scientists used 3D printing to attach clusters of energy-producing bugs to the cap of a button mushroom.

Word of the day: “xanthophylls” - the class of pigments responsible for the yellows in both autumn leaves & egg-yolks. Xanthophylls are present year-round, but as chlorophyll breaks down each fall, many-splendoured yellows – gold, ochre, lemon, amber – are disclosed by decay. pic.twitter.com/URTRTYYe3a

Fascists in a democracy demand the right of free speech, but once in power will absolutely, definitively, not grant it to anyone other than themselves. That’s their trick and they know it perfectly well.

In Hungary, Latvia, and Greece, travelers will be given an automated lie-detection test—by an animated AI border agent. The system, called iBorderCtrl, is part of a six-month pilot led by the Hungarian National Police at four different border crossing points. “We’re employing existing and proven technologies—as well as novel ones—to empower border agents to increase the accuracy and efficiency of border checks,” project coordinator George Boultadakis of European Dynamics in Luxembourg told the European Commission. “iBorderCtrl’s system will collect data that will move beyond biometrics and on to biomarkers of deceit.”

Eric Edsinger is an octopus researcher at the University of Chicago who recently helped sequence the genome of Octopus bimaculoides—the California two-spot octopus. Like most octopuses, this color-changing cephalopod is asocial, meaning it likes to be alone most of the time, unless it’s trying to mate. But when given MDMA, a drug well known for boosting emotional empathy and prosocial behavior in humans (i.e. making you really, really want to fraternize), these octopuses also seemed to want to hang out with each other, even if they weren’t trying to find a mate.

Bots and Russian trolls spread misinformation about vaccines on Twitter to sow division and distribute malicious content before and during the American presidential election, according to a new study. Scientists at George Washington University, in Washington DC, made the discovery while trying to improve social media communications for public health workers, researchers said. Instead, they found trolls and bots skewing online debate and upending consensus about vaccine safety. The study discovered several accounts, now known to belong to the same Russian trolls who interfered in the US election, as well as marketing and malware bots, tweeting about vaccines. Russian trolls played both sides, the researchers said, tweeting pro- and anti-vaccine content in a politically charged context. “These trolls seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society,” Mark Dredze, a team member and professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins, which was also involved in the study, said.

Ramdev has been compared to Billy Graham, the Southern Baptist firebrand who advised several American presidents and energized the Christian right. The parallel makes some sense: Ramdev has been a prominent voice on the Hindu right, and his tacit endorsement during the landmark 2014 campaign helped bring Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power. He appeared alongside Modi on several occasions, singing the leader’s praises and urging Indians to turn out for him. Ramdev has called Modi “a close friend,” and the prime minister publicly lauds Patanjali’s array of ayurvedic products — medicines, cosmetics and foodstuffs. Although Modi campaigned heavily on promises to reform India’s economy and fight corruption, there were frequent dog whistles to the Hindu nationalist base, some of them coordinated with Ramdev. A month before Modi’s landslide victory, a trust controlled by Ramdev released a video in which senior leaders of Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.), including the current ministers of foreign affairs, internal security, finance and transportation, appeared alongside him with a signed document setting out nine pledges. These included the protection of cows — animals held sacred in Hinduism — and a broad call for Hindu nationalist reforms of the government, the courts, cultural institutions and education. After Modi won, Ramdev claimed to have “prepared the ground for the big political changes that occurred.”

Through a mix of design and accident, we’ve created a novel environment that is at once strongly shaped by human behaviors and highly opaque to normal human sensory modalities. But we haven’t instrumented this environment well enough to make up for our sensory deficits. Worse, we seem to collectively lack the instrument rating to fly this civilizational airplane. So we are flying blind into the anthropocene, without the appropriate instrument rating, on a wing and a prayer.

Larvae are creatures in a process of becoming or development that have not yet actualized themselves in a specific form. This space is a space for the incubation of philosophical larvae that are yet without determinate positions or commitments but which are in a process of unfolding.

Yesterday, the European Parliament approved amendments to the controversial Copyright Directive, a piece of legislation intended to update copyright for the internet age. Few pieces of legislation have polarized Europe this much in recent years. Critics said the vote heralded the death of the internet, while supporters congratulated themselves for saving the livelihoods of starving artists and giving US tech giants a poke in the eye.

There’s evidence that this four-person limit on conversations has been in place for about as long as humans have been having chatting with one another. Shakespeare rarely allowed more than four speaking characters in any scene; ensemble films rarely have more than four actors interacting at once. But why do we max out at four?

The Zuni maps, says Jim, contain something very important: a different way of looking and knowing. “To assume that people would look at the earth only from a vantage point that is above and looking straight down doesn’t consider the humanity of living on the landscape. Saying that there’s a pond, there are cattails, there are turtles in that water—that is a different view that expands the human experience of a place.” This different view is what Jim, the committee, and the artists hope the Zuni people will recognize when they encounter these maps and consider their place in the cosmos—not a world that is constructed from GPS waypoints or one that was decreed in an executive order—but a particularly Zuni world, infused with the prayers and histories that created it. The Zuni maps have a memory, a particular truth. They convey a relationship to place grounded in ancestral knowledge and sustained presence on the land. That such a relationship consistently fails to appear on modern maps has been the impetus for creating and sharing the Zuni maps—both with the A:shiwi people and with a wider audience. They remind all of us of the ancient names, voices, and stories that reside within the landscape, inviting us to examine our assumptions about what it is that makes up a place and the role that we play in that long and layered story.

the advent of the mass-produced graphite pencil in the second half of the 19th century coincided with profound changes in the way a performer engaged with a musical text. The generation of musicians who benefited from the new tool — capable of making durable, but erasable, markings that didn’t harm paper — were, he wrote, “the first where practice was aimed at perfection of execution, and not developing the skills for real-time extemporization on the material in front of them, or improvisation ‘off book.’” What changes does the new digital technology reflect or enable? Conversations with some of classical music’s most passionate advocates of the gadgets and with developers like forScore and Tonara that write applications for them reveal a number of developments. The traditional top-down structure of teaching has been shaken loose. The line between scholarly and practical spheres of influence is becoming blurred. And the very notion of a definitive text is quickly losing traction — and with it, the ideal of that “perfection of execution.”

Wherever the infraordinary is taken away, wherever civilians are targeted, not only in Paris, Perec’s manifesto rings true. “Question your teaspoons,” he urges us. “What is there under your wallpaper?” he asks. Perec’s parents were killed in the Second World War, his father in the army, his mother in a concentration camp. He had firsthand experience of the eruption of evil into the everyday, so while in some ways An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is a comically Parisian text—oh, the French and their wine at lunch—on some level, it is the diary of an orphaned child who can never accept that the world is the way it is. Why is the world put together this way? This si parisien elevation of the ordinary into something compelling knows that in its peripheral vision lurks the menace of evil, and purposefully, radically chooses to focus, instead, on the fabric of peace.

Some of these skilled lawyers did question whether their profession could ever entirely trust automation to make skilled legal decisions. For a small number, they suggested they would be sticking to “reliable” manual processes for the immediate future. However, most of the participants stressed that high-volume and low-risk contracts took up too much of their time, and felt it was incumbent on lawyers to automate work when, and where, possible. For them, the study was also a simple, practical demonstration of a not-so-scary AI future. However, lawyers also stressed that undue weight should not be put on legal AI alone. One participant, Justin Brown, stressed that humans must use new technology alongside their lawyerly instincts. He says: “Either working alone is inferior to the combination of both.”

At its most fundamental level the movie asks: Can we live ethically in a cursed world? And if so, how? Princess Mononoke offers two related possible solutions. The first is simply to “Live!” (Ikiro!), the catchphrase emblazoned on the movie posters and uttered by the movie’s protagonist, Ashitaka, to the desperate wolf princess San as she struggles to deal with her fear and resentment of humanity. In context, it tells us we cannot give up, no matter what, a message that Miyazaki felt imperative in the emotionally apathetic landscape of nineties Japan. The second is “to see with eyes unclouded”—a challenge, as the movie presents both bloodthirsty beast attacks and relentless human industrialization, and asks us to observe all sides with clarity and objectivity.